1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to computing systems with wireless radio devices and more particularly to mobile computing systems with wireless interface for data processing with peripheral devices. This invention relates to the field of wireless peripheral data processing by a mobile computing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Computing systems incorporate a variety of wireless interfaces with multiple technological standards to provide services to wireless peripheral devices. To service a request from wireless device, the computing system, first validate the request before servicing the request. If the request is from an unauthorized device then the computing system rejects the service request. Every time a computing system receives a service request from a device, the processor of the computing system acknowledges the request and upon validation check, either provides the service or rejects the request. The process of answering a service call from wireless peripheral devices requires that the processor must be in an active state. For the processor to be active, the computing system must be in a fully powered mode.
Mobile computing systems have limited battery resources and generally stay in a low power sleep state until fully powered processing is required by a user. Every time a service request is received from an unauthorized device, the processor of mobile computing system comes out of the sleep state and performs the validation check. If the device requesting the service is unauthorized to use the computing resources, the processor will reject the request and go back to inactive or sleep state. In an environment where multiple wireless devices are in operation, the processor is constantly interrupted for service requests from unauthorized devices. Even though, when a user is not using the computing system in full power mode, these wireless service interruptions still cause processor to constantly utilize full power of the computing system. This consumes critical battery resources of mobile computing system. Thus, it is necessary to limit service calls from unauthorized wireless peripheral devices so that the critical processing and power resources of processor are reserved for application processing by the user.
When the computing system is in a fully powered state, the validation process takes valuable processing bandwidth of the processor, which slows processor""s response to other authorized wireless and internal input output devices. With the current implementation of technology, processor must respond to every service request and thus loose valuable processing bandwidth and in case of mobile computing system, loose critical battery resources. The computing systems are extremely mobile and more and more wireless devices interact with the computing systems. With the growth of technology and interoperability of incompatible wireless standards for peripheral devices, a need has been felt to improve the functioning and efficiency of mobile computing devices.
Low power devices such as Personal Data Assistant (PDA) have been developed to take advantage of operating systems (OS) such as Palm(copyright) OS and Windows(copyright) CE. These operating systems, in conjunction with a PDA system, permit a reduced or specialized functionality computing system. Typically, these PDAs are relatively small and can perform a variety of useful functions such as arrange calendars; schedule appointments; send and receive e-mail; provide presentations; create documents; and provide communications. The PDA operating systems can permit exchange of files between the PDA systems and a computing system with Microsoft Windows(copyright) files. While the reduced functionality can be a disadvantage of the PDA system, this system has several advantages. The reduced functionality and absence of disk storage extends the time between battery recharges.
The present invention provides a solution by incorporating multiple systems in a combination of computing system with pre-filtering of certain power consuming events by a low powered device. Low power device such as PDA is used to perform the overhead and pre-wakeup functions such as validation of wireless resources requested by a peripheral device, quick look up of certain data, email and like. In one embodiment, present invention utilizes a Personal Data Assistant (PDA), incorporated in a computing system, to perform the validation of requests by wireless peripheral devices. When a new wireless device enters the wireless working environment or wireless zone of mobile computing system and requests service from the computing system, PDA acknowledges all service requests and validates the requests without awakening the processor or bringing up processor in an active mode. PDA performs authorization and validation function even when the processor is in active state and the computing system is fully powered. In another embodiment, PDA performs peer to peer communication with various wireless devices within its environment without the interruption of computing system. This allows a client-to-client or server-to-server type communication by the computing system without a client-server type interaction.
In another embodiment of present invention, PDA provides limited computing system functionality for the user. The user can utilize certain computing resources of the computing system without bringing up the entire system in active state. The user can provision the types of services provided by the PDA based on the configuration and available resources of the computing system. However, the provisioning can also be done dynamically by the PDA or the processor.
The foregoing is a summary and thus contains, by necessity, simplifications, generalizations and omissions of detail; consequently, those skilled in the art will appreciate that the summary is illustrative only and is not intended to be in any way limiting. Other aspects, inventive features, and advantages of the present invention, as defined solely by the claims, will become apparent in the non-limiting detailed description set forth below.